Nokia Lumia 610 strips down for the FCC, user manual reveals new feature

Microsoft seems intent to bring Tango devices to market quickly and reverse the minuscule market share numbers Windows Phone is stuck with. Nokia is hand-in-hand with them in pursuit of that goal and now the Lumia 610 has already made its first regulatory pit stop on the way to its release: the FCC. The full contents of the FCC’s report has come out and there’s plenty of dull external photos, scandalous internal photos, and highly detailed user manual pages to sort through. The pictures also remind us of how slick and slim the device is, as well as its use of the micro-SIM format.

Speaking of that user manual, we spotted a new feature that the Lumia 610 is apparently going to feature upon its release. As you can see in the image above (click to enlarge it), the 610 will include a new flip-to-mute feature which lets you place the device face down on a surface to silence an incoming call. HTC has a similar feature but it goes through their external Attentive Phone application — by contrast this new feature seems to be baked in. This could be a new feature in Tango, but since drivers and accelerometers are involved we have a hunch Nokia has done some under-the-hood work themselves.

The manual goes on to detail features we know are a part of Tango like the new MMS functionality, but that’s pretty much all there is to it. Finally, the device the FCC tested has support for AT&T’s 3G frequencies so you can interpret how significant that is yourselves.

Author Description

Saad Hashmi

Founder of Windows Phone Daily. Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Marketing and Information Systems. While procrastinating on that goal I write, play games a little too often, and watch exorbitant amounts of mediocre half-hour comedies because I lack the patience to watch hour-long dramas that are probably better. Follow me on Twitter: @Saad073

Recent Comments

Does it really matter what US network carries this? It's probably the least favoured platform in the US already... their market share is tiny. If they're lucky they might want to emphasize where it's going and when it's getting there in some markets that are already shrinking due to a lack of product.Ms ... half hearted as always...Xin: on AT&T and T-Mobile will carry the Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL

Having the tab bar at the top is a big mistake in my eyes -- that's just not going to be friendly for one-handed use, and where Pivots meant you could swipe between sections, that's gone now in favour of swipe to delete.Meanwhile, some apps are putting sections into hamburger menus, which will also be more difficult to reach and arguably reduce user engagement since important sections are now being hidden away from where before they'd be part of a parorama or pivot.I think most of these changes have been made because Microsoft needed a model that'd scale to desktop windowed apps, the old model of pivots and panoramas just wasn't a great fit outside of tablets and phones.Elsewhere, it just doesn't look as nice or as fluid. Windows Phone's UI was designed as a typographic interface where white text was floating in 3D space over a black background (or vice versa), which led to some pretty striking animation as you moved forwards through apps.That's evidently gone, and with Pivots and Panoramas being buried across the board, ModernUI's defining feature is no longer how it works, just how it looks. Except everyone's gone flat now at this stage.Fronkhead: on Modern UI Comparison: Windows 10 versus Windows Phone 8.1